solarbird | (Reply)

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Yeah, Silver. Golden Age (original; an anti-aircraft missile would knock the breath right out of him and he could be hurt), Silver Age (50s-70s, discussed above), and modern, where he's more like Golden Age than Silver, are the three categories I know about. The 1990s animated series - which for my money is the best handling of the character - is modern; he's awfully hard to hurt and is awfully, awfully strong, but the super-breath thing doesn't exist at all, and he needs things like air to breathe, and he can't hear sound waves in space (since there's no, you know, air), and his super-hearing doesn't mean he hears everything on earth, just a lot of things - stuff like that. He's powered to the level where he's a real brick, but you can tell stories and not have them be stupidly contrived. Plus: no superdickery. ^_^

Anyway, in the 1990s animated version, Kryptonian spaceflight was actually pretty limited. Getting to orbit was routine, but they didn't get out-system yet except for a few experimental ships. His father's plan when he figured out what was going on was to put everyone in the phantom zone (along with masses of supplies, etc), fly the ship to earth, then retrieve everyone once there. Basically, getting a single person to another solar system was at the very limits of what they could manage. But he ran out of time, and there were other complicating matters I won't go into here - there were specific reasons the planetary council didn't believe him - that kept his plan from happening.